Fiber optic waveguides enable the serial transmission of information from a driver to a receiver at a relatively long distance (kilometers) and at very high data rates (billions of bits per second). High performance data processing complexes require system buses among its elements to have very high bandwidths of information transfer (100's of millions of bytes per second). The use of a single conductor, such as a fiber optic waveguide, can be insufficient to serve as such a system bus because of bandwidth limitations.
In the prior art, one solution to the bandwidth problem has been to use multiple conductors in parallel, each conductor carrying a bit of each word to be transmitted. A second solution, known as data striping, entails sending a plurality of data words in parallel over multiple conductors in a serial fashion. Each word is transmitted serially over a single conductor, but it is transmitted in parallel with other words on other conductors.
One challenge in implementing a data striping technique for information transmission is the determination of which of the multiple conductors attached to a computer element form the system bus linking one computer element to another. Some prior ad systems attempt to use each of the conductors Which is physically attached to the computer element. This method has a significant drawback in that if one of the conductors is not operational, the entire bus is rendered inoperable. Other prior art systems have attempted to configure a system bus using only the operational conductors, but these prior ad systems have been driven by hardware switches and have been further limited to system buses of two conductors.
A second challenge is determining that the conductors for the data striping are all connected to the same destination and in the correct order for data striping. A method of detecting and reporting these failures is described. Prior ad has required that multiple conductor buses be physically connected together at each end. This method is not possible with some conductor media, such as microwaves, and may not be desirable with other media based on externally imposed requirements, such as right of way requirements that optical fibers be individually pluggable.
A third challenge is finding a method to allow a conductor that is not pad of the operational data striping, but attached to the channel to exchange information with the other end of the conductor without affecting the ongoing data striping operations. Prior art requires the entire bus to be taken in order to diagnose a single failing member.